Heavens Fall

this film is awesome, the story is breathtaking, the actors wonderful. I saw it at the Midwest Screening and the theater was completely spellbound. It has the heart and soul of "To Kill a Mockingbird". The scenery is so beautiful and interesting. The storyline is inspiring. No wonder Timothy Hutton chose to take this role, his character is smart, courageous and in this current political climate he is a hero for us. The rest of the cast wonderful, realistic and also multidimensional. The historical representation is authentic and yet very creative. You leave the movie inspired. What more can you ask for? Thank you for making such a thoughtful and entertaining film!! I know it will go far.

Not even 100 years ago, the south ... America wise and geography wise .. still had issues with colored people. It's not that nowadays everything is better ... and maybe a case like this would/could still happen ... but I'd like to believe that it is not as likely as it was back then.

Because it was "easy" to just claim a (or multiple) black people did something unlawful ... and everyone just took your word for it. No evidence nothing more needed. Well apart from the testimony ... well rather coerced guilty plea by those who were accused of doing something wrong. It is not a spoiler and it is not really something that should surprise you, that the crime they are accused of here, is something they did not commit.

Still it is about how the systems worked back then and what hoops one has to go through to get a somewhat fair trial ... not an easy watch, but very well acted by all involved ... with the addition of a young Anthony Mackie.

I had the pleasure of seeing the world premiere of Heavens Fall at the Austin's Paramount Theatre as part of the SXSW film festival. It is a powerful film about the great injustices that occurred during the infamous Scottsboro trial of nine black men accused of raping two white women in Alabama in the 1930s.

While this story has been told before in a 1976 NBC TV movie, Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys (which I haven't seen and which I suspect would be pretty difficult, if not impossible to find on VHS or DVD today) and more recently in the powerful PBS documentary, Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, it's a story worth telling again for each new generation.

A film like recent Best Picture winner, Crash, reminds us that racism still exists in our society today. A film like Heavens Fall provides historical context and reminds us of the slow progress that has been made since the days of the Jim Crow South. This film reminds me of other recent films that have reminded us of some of the other tragic episodes of past racism such as Mississippi Burning, Amistad, and, particularly, the marvelous film, Rosewood. As with all films of this genre, some events and characters have been fictionalized in an attempt to capture of the spirit of the story rather than all of the detail.

Heavens Fall features first-rate performances by Timothy Hutton as the Jewish New York lawyer who travels to Alabama to defend the 9 black men, David Strathairn as the the trial judge, and Bill Sage as the prosecutor. The movie moves a bit slowly. The lead characters, including the prosecutor, are presented as human beings taking away from the stereotyping of white southerners which is quite easy in this type of film. It's occasionally a little predictable and clichéd - something almost unavoidable with this genre. Ironically, I think that more could have been done to develop the African-American characters. The accused are not really presented in great depth and the one black character, a journalist, seems a bit extraneous to the plot of the story. Still, basically a good job is done in presenting the main characters as human beings struggling for truth and justice as they define it in a highly imperfect world.

At our world premiere screening, the director and many of the actors were present and spoke about the making of the film. Timmothy Hutton was unable to attend, but as the director and other actors were speaking to the audience, Hutton phoned into to the director's cell phone to receive loud cheers from the audience and answer a few questions via cellphone to microphone. The film was clearly a labor of love by the director and actors. I hope that it finds a distributor and is seen widely, because Americans need to see the realities of their history in order to learn from it.

I liked the movie a lot, and when I saw that it was inspired by a true story, well that got me thinking: 1 Is that possible that someone even one person could do such a thing without any remorse's? 2 If it's possible than can't we really do anything to stop and prevent such an awful act from happening? 3 And last but not least, are there still places not only in U.S. but on earth were such a thing is still possible? I understand that it's in their culture to HATE the black community, it's their educations foul, from father to son and so on and so fourth,but really,come on wake up... This of course applies to the past but I'm afraid that it's appliable in our present to.

This movie was good overall with excellent performances from the cast and the cinematography was excellent. The script however could have been better as I would have liked it to go into more details about the other defendants but it was well written otherwise.